[ Saturday ]
DVD Format Wars Delay Acceptance
PluggedIn: Format War Keeping DVDs from Mainstream
Sat January 10, 2004 07:24 AM ET
(Page 1 of 2)
By Elinor Mills Abreu
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Don't toss out your VCR for a fancy DVD upgrade just yet.
While DVD recorder prices are indeed falling, there are still technological hurdles in preserving home movies and television programs as pristine digital copies. Until those obstacles can be overcome, videotapes will still be the norm, experts say.
"DVD recorders are more for the person who either needs a new VCR anyway, but doesn't have a library of VHS tapes, or for somebody who has a digital camcorder and wants to digitally dump the information from the camcorder" onto DVDs, said Mike Wood, editor-in-chief of Digital TV magazine.
It may be many years before videotapes go the way of the 8-track tape and vinyl records.
The longevity of DVDs and their ease of use, including the ability to create "chapters" to organize the content, make them an attractive storage medium for things like home movies.
The advent of TiVo and other TV program search services also makes it easier to find and record favorite television shows and movies.
Prices of DVD recorders have fallen to as low as $250 at Fry's Electronics in Palo Alto, California, compared with prices topping $1,000 two years ago when they first became widely available.
The global DVD recorder market is expected to reach $4.6 billion in 2003 and more than double in shipments this year, according to market analysts at Nomura Securities.
The plunging prices suggest that the devices are no longer the province of geeks and "early adopters," but are as mainstream as CD burners.
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